The Economic Basis of Politics

Charles Beard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429603075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Originally published in 1922, this volume is composed of four lectures which the author gave at Amherst College in 1916 on the Clark Foundation. The founders of this lectureship desired to help carry forward the eternal quest of mankind for ways and means with which to control its social destiny for noble ends. This book includes chapters on the doctrines of the philosophers, economic groups and the strucutre of the state, and the doctrine of political equality.

I

The Doctrines of the Philosophers

THE founders of this lectureship desire to help carry forward the eternal quest of mankind for ways and means with which to control its social destiny for noble ends. Some of the most splendid traditions of the race are associated with this search. The mystic Plato, the sagacious Aristotle, the gentle Sir Thomas More, and the courageous Condorcet, to mention none nearer our time, sought far and wide for the key to the great mystery. The fruits of their labors are a priceless heritage.

The imperious Burke likewise thought the theme worthy of his talents, but he soon gave it up, confessing defeat. “I doubt,” he says, “whether the history of mankind is yet complete enough, if it ever can be so, to furnish ground for a sure theory on the internal causes which necessarily affect the fortune of a state. I am far from denying the operation of such causes: but they are infinitely uncertain, and much more obscure and much more difficult to trace than the foreign causes that tend to raise, to depress, and sometimes to overwhelm a community. It is often impossible, in these political inquiries, to find any proportion between the apparent force of any moral causes we may assign and their known operation. We are therefore obliged to deliver up that operation to mere chance, or, more piously (perhaps, more rationally), to the occasional interposition and irresistible hand of the Great Disposer.” In short, confronted by the complex and bewildering facts of social life, Burke cries aloud, with the mediaeval priest overwhelmed by the horror of the Black Death, “Deus vult.”

In the field of natural science, such a confession is a plea of intellectual bankruptcy. In that sphere persistent and penetrating research, relentless and unafraid, brings about the progressive conquest and subjugation of the material world. Indeed the very research in mechanics and chemistry that produced the machine age has torn asunder the foundations of the old social order, released new and terrifying forces, and now threatens the dissolution of society itself. The present plight of the world seems to show that mankind is in the grip of inexorable forces which may destroy civilization if not subdued to humane purposes. It may be that in the end we must, with Burke, confess the futility of our quest. Even then we shall say with Heine:

Also fragen wir beständig
Bis man uns mit einer Handvoll
Erde endlich stopft die Mäuler,
Aber ist das eine Antwort?

So the eternal search goes on. At the very outset the seekers are confronted by two conflicting theories concerning the problem itself. These are summed up by John Stuart Mill at the opening of his famous work on representative government. According to one of them, government, namely, human control, is merely a problem in invention, of determining what is best and adapting our means to the desired end. According to the other theory, government is not a matter of human choice at all but an inevitable, natural growth in which the purposes of man have no part.

Each of these doctrines, we must admit with Mill, is untenable if pushed to an exclusive and logical conclusion; yet somewhere in between them lies important truth. Long the victim of material forces, man has, by taking thought, made himself master of wind and wave and storm. May he not, by taking thought, lift himself above the social conflicts that destroy civilizations and make himself master of his social destiny? Perhaps not; but as the human mind is greater than the waterfall which it compels or the lightning’s flash which it confines, so the control of human destiny is a nobler object of inquiry than the search for material power. Even though every door be slammed in our faces, still must we knock.

As the theme is old, we, as humble students, must, of necessity, first survey the conclusions of the great masters who have gone on before. We must first find out what they thought about the nature of the forces which are responsible for the origins, forms, and changes of political institutions.

At the beginning of such an inquiry we face, of course, the mighty Aristotle, “the master of all them that know.” He rightly deserves to be called “the father of political science” because he took it out of the sphere of utopian idealism where Plato left it and placed it on the strong foundation of natural history. As Oncken rightly says, it was the use of the methods of natural science in his inductive studies that enabled Aristotle to make his great contribution to Greek thought. He was the son of a doctor who had written many books on medicine and physiology and he was himself no mean student of morphology and anatomy. Moreover he combined practical experience in politics with long and wide-reaching researches in the history of human institutions. It is for these reasons, perhaps, that Aristotle stood midway between those who thought that human society was a mechanism to be refashioned at will and those who accepted good and ill as fatalities of the gods. At all events we know that he sought to combine the idealism of ethics with the realism of historical research.

The most striking thing about Aristotle’s Politics is the sharp contrast which it presents to most modern books on the same subject. The latter deal mainly with the structure and forms of government, the machinery and methods of elections, the powers and duties of public officers. The texture of society itself is left to the sociologist. The production and distribution of wealth, the foundations of human life, are assigned to the economist.

The reasons for this somewhat arbitrary carving up of the social organism for the purposes of study are not difficult to discover. Adam Smith and the older writers spoke of “Political Economy.” About the middle of the nineteenth century, thinkers in that field were mainly concerned with formulating a mill owner’s philosophy of society; and mill owners resented every form of state interference with their “natural rights.” So “political economy” became “economics.” The state was regarded as a badge of original sin, not to be mentioned in economic circles. Of course, it was absurd for men to write of the production and distribution of wealth apart from the state which defines, upholds, taxes, and regulates property, the very basis of economic operations; but absurdity does not restrain the hand of the apologist.

To this simple historical explanation must be added another. This is an age of intense specialization. Every field of human knowledge is so vast that the workers therein are driven, in their endeavour to see things as they really are, further and further into the details of their subject. They then easily forget the profound truth enunciated by Buckle that the science of any subject is not at its centre but at its periphery where it impinges upon all other sciences. So the living organism of human society as a subject of inquiry has been torn apart and parcelled out among specialists.

Aristotle, by contrast, combines economics, politics and ethics. He considers the nature and function of the family before he takes up the forms of state. He then moves to the subject of property in its human relationships and considers the limits of communism and individualism. He rejects the former as impossible but he tells us that “poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.” At no time does he lose sight of ethics. The aim of the family and of property, as of the state, is the best life. Property as a means of getting more property or as an end in itself is inconceivable to him as a philosopher. Its aim is to enable man to live temperately and well, and this aim should determine the amount which each citizen ought to hold.

Having surveyed the family and property and the production and distribution of wealth,—the texture of society—Aristotle proceeds to the consideration of the forms and nature of government, the causes of revolutions, and the conditions which favour the best society of which human nature is capable. How sound is this, how wise, how much more scientific than our modern practice of dissection and distribution among specialists! So the first conclusion to be drawn from Aristotle is that he never for an instant dreamed that ethics, politics, and economics could be torn apart and treated as separate subjects. He would have said of such pseudo-sciences with Ruskin: “I simply am uninterested in them as I should be in a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown on that supposition that it would be advantageous to roll students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitutions.” Aristotle simply could not imagine a treatise on the state that did not consider the whole man rather than a highly hypothetical man—man as a mere political animal. This is apparent in his treatment of every phase of his subject.

When he approaches the heart of the matter, namely, the causes of variations in the forms of the state, he immediately relates economics and politics. He declares that there must “necessarily be as many different forms of government as there are ranks in the society, arising from the superiority of some over others and their different situations. And these seem to be two, as they say of the winds: namely, the north and the south; and all the others are declinations from these. And thus in politics, there is the government of the many and the government of the few; or a democracy and an oligarchy. … A democracy is a state where the freemen and the poor, being the majority, are invested with the power of the state. An oligarchy is a state where the rich and those of noble families, being few, possess it.” In commenting on this laconic explanation of the differences in the form of the state by reference to differences in wealth, Aristotle’s distinguished editor, Jowett, remarks in an equally laconic fashion: “As the poor or the middle class, or the notables predominate, they divide the government among themselves.”

As economic classes depend upon the character and distribution of property, and as the forms of state turn upon the predominance of classes, it would follow logically that alterations in the form of state must have some connection with the changing fortunes of classes. This is exactly the conclusion Aristotle reached after he had considered the forces and conditions which produce revolutions in the affairs of nations. “Political revolutions,” he says, “spring from a disproportionate increase in any part of the state. … When the rich grow numerous or properties increase, the form of government changes into an oligarchy or a government of families. … Revolutions break out when opposite parties, e. g. the rich and poor, are equally balanced and there is little or nothing between them. … Revolutions in democracies are generally caused by the intemperance of demagogues who either in their private capacity lay information against rich men until they compel them to combine (for a common danger unites even the bitterest enemies) or, coming forward...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright
• Table of Contents
• I The Doctrines of the Philosophers
• II Economic Groups and the Structure of the State
• III The Doctrine of Political Equality
• IV The Contradiction and the Outcome